Mr Burns

The last show at the Almeida, King Charles III, was a daringly clever play that used exquisite pastiche, both serious and playful, to suggest that the only way we can imagine our near future is by retelling old stories and reusing old forms. And so, pleasingly enough, is the new show at the Almeida. 

Mr Burns by Anne Washburn comes to the Almeida hot-foot from Playwrights Horizons in New York. The play has caused a bit of a furore here with at least two critics (well one critic and Tim Walker) giving it vitriolically bad reviews. 'this is a play that can only possibly put people off theatre', 'three hours of utter hell', 'By the [third act], I’d lost the will to live, and can only hope that if this is the future of theatre after the apocalypse, I’d rather not survive it myself'. And so on. But actually, it's also had some very good reviews and a fair number that sit on the fence. So it's not quite Marmite: some hate it, some love it, and some seem just rather mystified.

It doesn't seem that mystifying to me. It has an Off-Broadway quirkiness about it, which is fairly alien to London theatre tastes (I usually find that kind of thing maddening), and it's unusual for a show in Britain to invest so heavily - and unironically at heart - in popular culture, to investigate it and treat it as a wellspring for understanding who we are. But the story is pretty straightforward: there has been some kind of apocalyptic collapse of civilisation in America centred on the collapse of the electricity grid and one of the things the survivors do is try to tell each other stories they remember from before the fall, including episodes of The Simpsons. Some months later this has evolved and now amateur theatre groups tour lo-fi live and imperfectly-remembered versions of Simpsons episodes (but also episodes of The West Wing and Shakespeares and presumably much more), interspersed with adverts and medleys of pre-apocalyptic pop music. In the third act, seventy years later, these performances have evolved further: they are now a mixture of religious ritual, theatrical tragedy, sitcom, broadway musical, and opera. 

What links all the acts is the act of storytelling and an exploration of the idea that societies are drawn to tell and retell stories. In fact, in each act, the Cape Feare (1993) episode of The Simpsons is retold three times: once round a campfire, once in an amateur theatre show, and once in an extravagant high-art pantomime, where it is now mixed promiscuously with hints of Gilbert and Sullivan, Ricky Martin, Batman, Britney Spears, Night of the Hunter (1955) and the Scorsese-made Cape Fear (1991). We watch the evolution of the episode in these retellings, with, by the third act, the regular character, Mr Burns (but who, from memory, doesn't even appear in the Cape Feare episode) becoming the chief villain, displacing the original episode's Sideshow Bob. We understand this because Mr Burns is the villainous owner Springfield Nuclear Power Plant and, in a world where the electricity has apocalyptically failed us, Mr Burns would indeed come to be the emblem of everything wrong with the world, much as, in a Climate-Changed world a hundred years hence, Jeremy Clarkson might become a by-word for evil (I'm not joking).  the trivial in our culture might become the grand metonyms of a future society in exactly the same way King Lear's despair at the meaningless injustice of the world became a way to tell stories to each after Hiroshima and the Holocaust. The episode as we eventually find it is a thing of shreds and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches, oneirically combining the high and low, the comic and the tragic, music and prose; a bit like society really. Or religion. Or art.

What's so hard about this? It's what stories do. This small episode of a cartoon sitcom comes to serve a deeper function in a wholly changed world, marking a continuity with the past and a recognition of the present. The advertisements have reverted to 1950s styles and even so the cast worry about the psychology and the semiotics ('isn't Chablis one of those wines which was out of fashion but actually it's quite good?' / 'No. Common misconception but, no. Quincy, really, do you want to be a Chablis drinker?'). Jokes are stories too, little stories that punch a momentary air-hole in the transport box of my life and to forget a great joke is to feel stifled: 'Oh this is torture,' says Matt, struggling to remember a line, 'I know this is really funny'.

This might vaguely stir some memories of postmodernism but I don't think that's quite right. Yes, Mr Burns suggests we think about culture as an act of bricolage, but it's magnificently, naively, yearningly confident about storytelling about narratives, major and minor. In the first act, we begin with what sounds like (and it turns out is) the transcription of an improvisation between the actors trying to remember a famous Simpsons episode. It is night and they are around a campfire, like boy scouts, telling stories to stop themselves being scared. Because then a stranger appears and they conduct a formal - and terribly moving - process where they read out ten names of people they know whose whereabouts they don't know. Everyone in this ruined landscape, it seems, keeps a note of anyone they meet, so a ritual of any meeting is that they make this enquiry (limited to ten because, presumably, you can't monopolise the stranger's attention; we need to balance our desperation with the needs of others). The attempt to recall the episode is funny but recognisable (who hasn't at some point been in one of those conversations where people repeat their favourite lines from Simpsons or Frasier or Seinfeld or Larry Sanders? [And there should be a word for the pain you experience when someone misquotes a great line from a great sitcom; I'll ask the Germans, they're bound to have one]) but the arrival of the stranger punctures the humour and gives the scenes a kind of emotional context which both roots the scene and gives their desire to retell stories a seriousness and power. Yeah, deprived of civilisation, this is what we do. We cling to stories. Why wouldn't we? It's how we make sense of things. 

In the second act, it has become formalised. We've reconstructed some modicum of capitalism: adverts to fund the company, a system of exchange to build up the scripts (they have effectively monetised crowdsourcing; Twitter: take note), they have rebuilt a process of allocating performance rights to individual episodes, there seems to be a regulatory authority. We watch a rehearsal and the comic drive of the act is part of the argument: we are watching a comically huge effort to (re)create something trivial. In a way, it's a beautiful and touching to see such efforts because doesn't this remind anyone of, well, theatre? Theatre's triviality is in its uselessness, its evasion of the cycle of use-value and exchange-value, its oddly ineffable value for its own sake (because it's art, basically - well mostly). It continues to delight me that despite everything, despite two hundred years of Gradgrindian capitalism, people still expend huge energy and effort on useless acts of theatre.

In the third act, in a way, its use-value has been discovered. It does feel as if we are watching the religious enactment of a parable and Robert Icke's and Tom Scutt's visual embodiment of this in the costumes and set suggest a mixture of witch-doctors, Shakespearean performance, and sixth-form disco. The act is perfectly pitched because we are never quite sure whether we are supposed to laugh at it (there are some brilliant jokes, some hilarious juxtapositions) or admire and be awed by it (the music is often gorgeous, the story, despite everything, becomes rather involving). It is theatre as ritual repetition and social therapy, though the stylistic tightrope that it treads again never quite says art is therapy; it teeters between utilitarianism and beauty.

Mr Burns is a brilliantly lucid bit of theatre. There's some additional fun if you are very familiar with The Simpsons but that's not vital, in fact, it's a distraction if you think it's all an in-joke for the fans. It could be anything; The Simpsons stands in for any story that embraces and touches a whole culture. It is The Bible, The Iliad, the Complete Works of Shakespeare and as such it's a challenge to how we think of art, religion, culture, the whole way of life that we move in. It's beautifully performed, too, because if it had been given a smooth, elegant London theatre production, it would have missed the point. This is a rough, crude, funny, clever, heartfelt, stupid evening of theatre and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Noodling

I don't like guitar solos. I'm not sure when this certainty formed in my mind. I certainly thought I liked guitar solos when I was younger. Well, I certainly thought I liked guitarists when I was younger, and I think that blurred unthinkingly into imagining I liked guitar solos. This struck me recently because the guitar solo seems to have almost completely disappeared from pop music. I'm sure it still hangs around in metal but how often do you hear a chart single - even from a notionally guitar-based indie band - with a guitar solo? 

Now don't get me wrong, I love a riff. Hell yeah. A really good guitar riff is great, but as a  gorgeous pop hook. Some of the greatest records of the last two decades - 'Richard III' by Supergrass, 'Seven Nation Army' by The White Stripes, 'Acquiesce' by Oasis (I know, I know, I'm sorry), 'Wake Me Up' by Girls Aloud - are stacked on top of gorgeous guitar riffs. But these are pop songs, tricked up in a rock style, and are the better for it.

I was struck by this recently, reading Nicholson Baker's Travelling Sprinkler which meditates very interestingly on pop music and in which the hapless middle-aged narrator buys a $70 guitar from Best Buy and tries to write and record songs. He struggles with soloing. I've never much bothered with it in my hobbyist guitar-plonking, always happy with chords and little flat-picking. I guess it's my age being so much a post-punk music listener. I did like Pink Floyd as a teenager and still like quite a lot of their stuff but, while I can appreciate the technical virtuosity of David Gilmour and I do think he's a gloriously articulate guitar player, fundamentally it leaves me a bit cold. The guitarists I've always really liked are ones who don't really play solos - Pete Townsend, Johnny Marr, Keith Richards, for instance - who mix rhythm and drop in little riffs and move between them without ever luxuriating in an extended guitar solo. 

But there are exceptions and I wanted to write about them. What's interesting is that the few guitar solos I like have almost the opposite of virtuosity. One would be Pete Shelley's three-note solo on The Buzzcocks's 'What Do I Get?' which, with supreme literalness, picks out the melody of the verse, such as it is. In the official video Shelley stands virtually motionless as if even offering this solo is a chore.

But there are two other solos that I really do like. The first is George Harrison's solo on the album version of 'Let it Be' (it starts at 1'58"). It's a solo that should probably never have been released. George Harrison had recorded a number of guitar solo overdubs on the song but when Phil Spector put together his mix of the album he used an early, very rough solo that Harrison had probably just laid down as a placeholder until something more melodic and appropriate came to him. Its virtuosity is not show-iffy; it's just a workman musician putting down something intuitive, trying something out. On the single version, there's a rather muddier and slower solo, still melodic (Harrison seemed incapable of not playing a melodic solo), but bogged down by the Leslie effect that turns it into a fairground pipe organ to my ears. I guess the idea is to keep with the 'organ' theme but it sounds to be rather unctuous and picks up the po-faced aspects of the song. What Ian Macdonald calls 'complacent uplift rather than revelation' (Revolution in the Head, p. 338). I can see that and, no, it's not my favourite Beatles song by a long way, but on the album version, Harrison's gritty, grainy, metallic guitar solo seems to me both to toughen up the song and make the sense of acquiescence more hard-won. It's beautifully placed, too. The song appears to come to rest, angelic church organ echo the finality and then Harrison's guitar just erupts into the song. It's so unexpected, so crude, so harsh. Even the little errors in it - around 2'06"-09" his fingers seem to get away from him - make it seem movingly effortful. It does a rather conventional guitar solo thing of slowly working it way up the scale, but it does so not to soar but to find new melodies; the very final little wobbly melody at 2'22" is filled with feeling, not the boring 'woman wailing' tone that a generation of guitarists schooled in Claptonism went with, but something much more confined to the world of the song. Bluesy but still part of a song.

The other guitar solo I love is related. It's Paul McCartney's guitar solo on 'Maybe I'm Amazed'. It's quite a similar song to Let it Be: piano-based, build around a descending bass line, hints of church organ and angelic choirs, but this one is Paul in his Little-Richard-blue-shouter mood and it's probably the rawest song he ever recorded. And he does a solo in it? In fact, he plays every instrument on the song. This is from his first solo album, mostly recorded on a home studio on his farm in Scotland while the Beatles were breaking up. 'Maybe I'm Amazed' was apparently recorded at Abbey Road, though still with Paul playing all the instruments. Paul is, as any fule kno, one of the greatest bass guitarists ever but in fact he had to be coerced onto the instrument through necessity, not wanting to be the guy who stands at the back. He saw himself, rightly, as a front man. So he started as a guitarist and, occasionally, as a drummer. McCartney was his chance to show off his multi-instrumental talents. In some ways this is the strength and weakness of the record; McCartney really needed someone to bounce ideas off, someone to occasionally say no to him. Recording all the parts yourself, the risk is that you keep adding and you try out ideas and you get used to them, however bad, and you lose perspective. You can hear that in 'Maybe I'm Amazed' at 2'05" when he dubs over the verse a series of reggae-kite guitar chops which come close to ruining the song.

But then he has this guitar solo. In fact, to be fair he plays it twice, once at 1'12" and again at 3'05". It's the second one I like the most though you need to have heard it once before for it to work. He's got an  effect on the guitar that makes it sound cheap, almost plastic.  Google tells me it may be a Fender amp with a little bit of reverb, which I guess is not that strange, but it makes the solo seem modest. The solo has its own little bluesy tune; you could set words to it. The thing that, I'll be honest, brings tears to my eyes whenever I hear it is the moment where he repeats a little phrase twice over the song's great chromatic run up the piano at 3'14". It seems to me a solo that is every bit as expressive of longing and loneliness as the lyric and the melody of the song itself. It's aided, in my mind, by the image of this pop genius, alone in the studio, feeling his life falling apart and reaching out to the person he loves through an experiment on an unfamiliar guitar fed through a little buzzy amp.

Someone has got hold of the isolated solo tracks and they're here. It confirms that sense of a technically awkward player fumbling his way towards something graceful and elegance, but it's the lack of sheeny virtuosity that makes it so moving.

UPDATE: I have been mildly inundated* with suggestions of other songs with great guitar solos. Of course, what I say above is an overstatement, though I really do have a problem with virtuosity in guitar solos. I am however happy to agree that the solos on 'Taxman' and 'Something' by The Beatles, 'Pale Blue Eyes' by The Velvet Underground (or indeed Edwyn Collins & Paul Quinn) 'Come Up And See Me' by Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, 'I Guess I've Come To Live Here In Your Eyes' by Willie Nelson, 'The Late Great Cassiopeia' by The Essex Green, and 'Rock God' by Roddy Frame are all excellent...

* How can you be 'mildly inundated'? Talk sense, man.

Now That I Run The Country

It came as a real shock at Christmas 2011 when I realised that I now run the country. News reached me in November that year when I discovered that the John  Lewis Christmas advertisement was to feature 'Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want' by The Smiths. The Smiths? The soundtrack of my youth? One of the first bands I liked that the adults totally didn't get? That swaggering mixture of shimmering guitars, gutsy rhythms, and Morrissey's profoundly subversive lyrics and profoundly subversive presence? Now attached to the middle-aged, middle-class solidly respectable ordinariness of John Lewis? But of course it was. Because I now run the country.

When I was young, pre-teen, one of the most familiar figures on TV was Max Bygraves. He was a guest on a lot of chat shows. He would come on, tell jokes and sing songs on various TV programmes. Comedians would tell jokes that assumed we knew who he was. He was a standard part of any impressionist's repertoire alongside Frank Spencer and Eddie Waring. But I knew who Frank Spencer was. I also knew who Eddie Waring was - well, no I didn't; I assumed the beginning and end of Eddie Waring was keeping the score on It's a Knockout (younger readers may need to Google It's a Knockout because for complicated moral and legal reasons, you will never get to watch that again). Max Bygraves was a singer and, somewhat, a comedian. His schtick was his cockney accent, his working class childhood and a series of songs, alternately childish ('You're a Pink Toothbrush', 'Gilly Gilly Ossenfeffer Katzenellenbogen By the Sea') and syrupy ('You Need Hands'). He had some big hits in the 1950s but they dried up in the sixties because, well, The Beatles and, well, The Sixties and he just clearly wasn't a figure of the times any more.

So why was he on TV two decades later in the late 1970s/early 1980s? Because the people who were making the creative decisions at the major television companies at that time were probably in their mid-forties and when they were teenagers in the late 40s, they loved Max Bygraves. They remember his humour, his alternatively childish and sentimental songs, his stories about growing up in the East End, the sketches he did between the numbers, and they probably thought he might speak to a new generation, and at least he'd speak to the generation that grew up with him and anyway, fuck it, let's get our childhood hero on the TV. Max had spent some of the seventies trading precisely on this nostalgia with his series of Singalongamax (etc.) albums throughout the decade, so he wasn't going to complain. Which is why, in 1979, a ten-year old kid in Lambeth, South London, could do a Max Bygraves impression to his friends and they all knew who I was impersonating. Because the people who grew up with Max Bygraves were now running the country.

I don't run the country, obviously. I've never been asked and anyway I'm busy. But my generation runs the country. David Cameron and Nick Clegg are between a year and eighteen months older than me. George Osborne and Ed Miliband are both a couple of years younger than me. As in government, so in theatre: Rufus Norris and Vicky Featherstone are only a wee bit older than I am. My generation's childhood is everywhere. The adverts are full of the music and imagery I grew up with, the way that adverts in the 1970s parodied wartime scenes, Angel Delight was sold with a Cole Porter song, and Ovalteen revived The Ovalteenies and everyone probably thought it was brilliant. My childhood is part of official nostalgia now. On X Factor, they have a Queen night, everyone likes Wham! and hipster bands studiedly revisit the New Romantics and David Cameron apparently likes The Smiths. Last year, they decided to remake Robocop too, because now I run the country.

But I don't like it and I'll tell you why. Not because I think The Smiths have sold out - that would be an quite ridiculous thing to say for someone who goes to John Lewis as much as I do. Not because they shouldn't be on an advert. I love the song; why not stick it in an advert? Not because it was a bad version. Hell, it was pleasant. A bit dull, a bit respectful but it was okay.

The reason I don't like it is that I can't bear the habit of cherishing the way things were when we were young. It's one of the dullest, dullest clichés of the middle aged that we so often believe that music was much better when we were teenagers. Music meant different things when I was 18, when I was frantically forming new synaptic connections along to the minimal amounts of music I could afford to buy; when I was newly adult and independent and I was making my own choices for the first time so every song shaped you like a mortar shell slamming into a field. The fact is that we will always find music that we love when we are 18 because that's what being 18 is. The mistake is to assume that it's the music that's special. It's not the music that's special; it's you, aged 18, that are special.

Which brings me to Michael Gove.

Michael Gove must be the most interventionist Secretary of State for Education this country has ever had. And by interventionist, I mean he paddles his interfering fingers in things about which he knows nothing. Now, given the tendency of Education Secretaries of all political stripes to meddle in the the structures of education at every level, this is saying something. But Gove has ignorantly interfered with education all the way from the macro - introducing Free Schools that compete for resources and children with the state sector - to the micro - he's just had Of Mice and Men removed from the syllabus on the unimpeachably pedagogical grounds that he doesn't care much for the book.

What is intriguing about Gove, though, is that, unlike most of his fellow Cabinet members, I don't believe his attacks on education are purely ideological. I don't think Gove is all that political. I think he just acts from a peculiarly intense sense of nostalgia for the way things were for him.

Take GCSE and A-Level. When Gove and I were teenagers, we did O Levels (almost entirely timed, formal, sit-down exams, almost entirely unseen, almost entirely writing essays, or great lists of questions) and we did A Levels (almost entirely the same). Doing a resit was virtually unheard of. You spent two years on an A Level and it all hung on maybe six hours in an exam hall over a couple of days. Having a bad day? Tough luck. A considerable amount of the preparation for History or for English was preparing a series of instantly modifiable skeleton essays that you could like lightning adapt to fit virtually any question asked, together with a handful of laboriously learned facts or quotes, adaptable to all exam situations. 

I was good at exams so I hope what I say now will have the force of experience. I was good at A Level exams, because I had worked out how to do exams and nothing else. I hadn't worked out how properly to evaluate the Enlightened Despots, or read Sense and Sensibility, or talk engagingly to a French person. Formal, timed, sit-down exams prepare you (a) to blag your way through intellectual challenges and (b) for literally nothing that will ever happen in your life outside the exam hall. In how many jobs does your boss say, you're going to be trained for two years and then you'll have to demonstrate your ability once and never again and you'll be judged on that for literally ever? Not many. More important, all the research over thirty years has shown that exams don't test people well, that they are particularly biased against girls, that they model a very narrow range of intellectual skills. 

When they introduced GCSEs - a year or two after I did my O Levels - they introduced an element of course work. The A Levels became a bit more modular: not everything happened at the end. The exams changed, requiring less cramming and learning of quotes, and more an ability to respond to new experiences. They tested a much greater range of people's abilities than essays. They meant that teachers were preparing their students for genuine intellectual skills: the ability to think intelligently on your feet, identify a problem, search for solutions, frame an answer. Unsurprisingly, exam results started to go up. At which point all those people who then ran the country started to complain because clearly education was magically perfect when they did their exams and now it's too easy.

Then Michael Gove showed up. Gove also thinks exams are too easy. Gove's reforms of A Level and GCSE are to turn the clock back. He wants to scrap most of the course work. He wants to make the qualifications, in the unfortunate terminology, terminal. He wants them to be linear. He wants them to be the exams he took when he was a teenager. And the thing is, there's no real ideology in this. I mean, sure, he thinks it's all very odd when lots and lots of people do well because in any competition there should be losers as well as winners, and I'm sure he has his party's fundamentalist conviction that introducing competition to a system always works, but I think he mainly just prefers things the way they were. Now, I'm not terribly fussed about Of Mice and Men being taken off the syllabus - sure!  give another book a chance! - though I do think it bizarre that this decision should be made purely because Michael Gove doesn't care for it. But then he's trying to remake the whole education system to be like the one he happened to do, so should we be surprised?

I think this is an ethical matter. Exams do not prepare you for openness. They prepare you to be tensed against the curve ball; they prepare you to be resilient and bloody-minded enough to face a new question and say what you already knew. Is this how we should live our lives? Should we not aim to be engaged, curious, alert, open people, as fully alive as we can be to the new experiences that world can offer? Isn't that a better, richer way to experience the world? To insist that I can change, I constantly change, because I take seriously the possibility that any experience, any book, a new friend, a piece of music, that loops the loop through my imagination might change who I am?

We all know people who have the opposite attitude, who affect a pose of boredom at everything, who are never happier when finding fault with the play or the song or the novel. People who Know What They Like and Know What They Think and Have Seen It All Before. People who can't wait to be the first person to say how much they disliked the show you've just seen (these people can often be heard on Radio 4's Saturday Review). These are the people who literally and metaphorically put The Smiths on the John Lewis advert, because they formed their tastes when they were 18 and have just been putting intellectual fat around it ever since. It's a deeply conservative view of the world; it's embodied in Gove's education reforms, and I hate it.

Michael Gove is only six months older than me and so I feel I have to apologise. Because these terrible things are happening now that I run the country.

Soap Opera

A row has broken out over the reviews of a new production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne. The critics have objected to aspects of the performance, specifically to the body-type of Tara Erraught, who is playing Count Octavian. Here's what they've said:

'Tara Erraught’s Octavian is a chubby bundle of puppy-fat, better suited to playing Mariandel in Acts 1 and 3 than the romantic rose-cavalier of Act 2 - ' wrote Andrew Clark in the Financial Times, adding, as if this is a distantly secondary consideration - 'albeit gloriously sung'. At least Rupert Christiansen in the Telegraph applauds her singing before turning to her figure: 'she is dumpy of stature and whether in bedroom déshabille, disguised as Mariandel[,] or in full aristocratic fig, her costuming makes her resemble something between Heidi and Just William. Is Jones simply trying to make the best of her intractable physique or is he trying to say something about the social-sexual dynamic?'. Richard Morrison in The Times makes even swifter work of her performance: 'Unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing'. In The Independent, Michael Church originally called Erraught a 'dumpy girl', though has had the cowardly decency to get that quietly edited out. Even The Guardian gets in on the act with Andrew Clements declaring that 'it's hard to imagine this stocky Octavian as this willowy wom[a]n's plausible lover'.

These critics are wrong at so many levels, that it's hard to disentangle them. First, of course, it's really disgraceful to say these personal and unpleasant things about another human being who, let's remember, has to go on stage every night in front of an audience and sing this role. At this level the problem is one of impoliteness. Second, there is the horrible, sneering misogyny of these comments. As if being 'unsightly and unappealing' to Richard Morrison is something an opera singer should be criticised for. Kiri Te Kanawa was on Radio 4 this morning and her dreadful defence of Erraught was to say she'd been frumpily costumed and anyway she's a 'lovely little girl'. Look, I think the picture at the top of this article shows how beautiful Erraught is, but that is not the point. It's about male opera critics thinking they have a right to judge a mezzo-soprano almost entirely on her looks. As we've seen Andrew Clark only adds a comment on her singing as an afterthought; Andrew Clements deals with the three women leads' voices in a sentence. Michael Church and Richard Morrison don't mention Erraught's  singing at all.

There has been some push-back, notably from the former North American editor of Gramophone, Anastasia Tsioulcas, who is wonderfully icy and determined in her remarks. The great Alice Coote has written a powerful attack on these reviews. Her argument is simple: these criticisms are entirely out of place because 'OPERA is ALL about the voice'. Any reference to the visual aspect of a body is irrelevant, because Opera 'is about and really ONLY about communication through great singing'. 

Is that right? Let me first say that I've not seen this production. Let me also admit that I'm not an avid operagoer. But I think there are some principles at stake here that overlap opera and theatre, about which I do know something. I am sure it is true to say that the vocal performance in opera is supremely important and by that we mean something live; it is not true to say that everything you can from live performance can be got from a recording. As in theatre, it's not just the performance but that the performance is happening there, right there, for us, by that extraordinary human being only a few arms' length away and which will never be repeated in quite the same way again. But that doesn't mean that this is the only thing that opera is about. In the nineteenth century, operas were frequently given as little more than recitals in some form of costume. Audiences were there for the live performance but not for the theatre of it. After Wagner and other innovators, the production became much more important and opera became immersive theatre avant la lettre a fusion of all the arts at the highest level, straining to give experiences of transcendent ravishment. So while opera may place the vocal performance at its heart or its height, it does not seem correct to say that comments on the visual aspects of the performance are out of place. Sexist and misogynist comments are - for other reasons - disgraceful but that doesn't mean critics should not be entitled, indeed encouraged, to assess the visual aspects of the performance.

Which leads me to my main point. It seems to me not a problem that the critics are making comments on the visuals; I don't even think that the fundamental problem is the sexism. It's the preposterous literalism of these comments that seems so out of place. 

Let's just recap here. This is the story of Der Rosenkavalier: Octavian is the young and secret lover of the older Princess von Werdenberg, whose husband is away. After a night of passionate sex, they are repeatedly interrupted and almost discovered, so Octavian dresses up as a chambermaid 'Mariandel' and thereby attracts the attention of the Princess's cousin, Baron Ochs. The Baron himself has been wooing the beautiful and wealthy heiress Sophie and is seeking a rose-cavalier, a young nobleman to take a silver rose to her as a way of proposing marriage on the Baron's behalf. This Octavian does but he and Sophie fall in love at once and Sophie spurns her fiancé. The Baron is furious and in the confusion is scratched with a sword, whereupon he pretends to be gravely wounded; the marriage is back on the cards. Octavian sends a letter purporting to be from Mariandel, accepting an invitation to dinner, so the Baron thinks he has both women. But as they are dining together, some hired hands have created a strange pantomime in which ghostly figures accuse the Baron and others appear claiming to be his wife and children. All is chaos, topped by Sophie's father discovering the tryst and fainting. Eventually the Princess arrives, sees off the Baron, and gives up her young lover Octavian to marry Sophie.

Chekhov it ain't. This is a farcical story, a broadly comic opera with some deeper resonances about the fickleness of male affection and the toll of time on women's attractiveness to men (a thematic which might have given - but didn't - those opera critics pause before they declared themselves on the matter of Erraught's figure). There is, to be sure, some degree of psychological truthfulness - it's not an entirely surreal fantasy - but its brush is broad and the strokes are vividly coloured. 

Can I just point out a couple of other obvious things? Octavian is conceived as a breeches role. It's a male role, to be played by a woman. This creates all sorts of non-realistic resonances: we watch a woman playing a man playing a woman; it allows for all sorts of queer frissons in the relationships between Octavian and the Marschallin and between Octavian and Sophie and between Octavian and the Baron Ochs and between Octavian and Mariandel; it also creates pleasurable intertextual references to similar breeches roles like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro. And finally: they're singing. The whole way through, when we know that in the imagined fictional world they are speaking, here we are seeing them singing. 

This is not naturalism. What we see is not what we take to be happening in the opera's fictional world. This is probably truer of opera than any other kind of performance. 

But look at the miserable defences that these critics have made of their comments? Richard Morrison in The Times this morning declared that audience 'expect dramatic credibility. They get that in films, in TV dramas and in the spoken theatre and don't see why exceptions have to be made for opera. When they are paying up to £215 a ticket, as at Glyndebourne, those expectations are pretty high'.

What a crock of shit. First, just because you see something in one cultural area, it does not mean you expect to see it somewhere else. On TV and film I see images projected against a screen; I don't expect to see that in the theatre. When I read novels and poetry, I see words printed on a page; I don't think I have a right to see that in an Opera, even if I were paying £500 a ticket. The problem here is that he's used this weaselly term 'dramatic credibility' and then secretly decided it means realism. But it doesn't mean that and he's offered no explanation for why he thinks it means that. And, let's also remember: this is a Richard Jones opera production. Richard Jones, who has probably gone as far from naturalism as any major director in this country; a man who has staged a scratch-and-sniff Love of Three Oranges for ENO in the early nineties is probably not really fishing in the naturalism pond.

This is important, because if the idea that the theatre can only represent the world through visual verisimilitude takes hold in opera, we're all sunk. Opera is like the bulwark against this kind of thin-lipped, flat-minded literalism in live performance. It has everything going for it: music (never realistic), the plots (never realistic), the scale (never realistic), the casting (never realistic), the designs (mostly unrealistic). There is always this push towards the directly realistic, the relatable (hideous hideous word), the accessible (defined as narrowly as possible). And these things are modes in which theatre can move and has moved very valuable from time to time, but it is a small percentage of what the theatre can be. How much will we impoverish ourselves and hurt the grandeur of a culture by telling extraordinary women like Tara Erraught that she's too fat to play a man who could attract two women. And there again, we see the thinness of this so-called realism: how many big, fat, generous, fleshy guys do you see with slim and beautiful women? Loads. This isn't realism; it's literal-mindedness which in turn is a mask for ideology.

Morrison suggests that it would be hypocritical to suggest that the production doesn't want us to comment on the bodies: 'The curtain goes up on the Marschallin, played by Kate Royal, gyrating - totally naked - in a shower of glitter. What is that except a blatant incitement for the audience (and critics) to take an interest in the bodies on stage as well as the voices?' See again, the duplicity and confusions. First, one naked body doesn't licence you to simply write the entire review with your cock in hand. Second, there's a keyword there: glitter. Is this a deliberate appeal to your lust or is it a knowing, camp, representation of desire as excess? Is it not referring to the gaze of the male/female Octavian, staging it as problem and question? Third, taking an interest in the bodies on stage is not the same as rebuking a woman for her weight. You should notice the bodies, but the bodies are part of the whole system by which the production is asking us to look again at this story, these characters, these feelings, that music, this opera. It is not an invitation for critics to fat-shame a young woman.

Fair's Fair

There's a thing people have started saying which interests and puzzles me. It's 'to be fair'. Now, I know what 'to be fair' usually means, but what's happening now is that people are using it exactly in place of 'to be honest'.

It's a very subtle shift of meaning but it's definitely happening: I've noticed it for a couple of years now. I first heard it in footballers' post-match interviews. 'Our defending just isn't good enough, to be fair', 'if we want to escape relegation, we're going to have to give it 110%, to be fair'. But it's spread elsewhere. Last week, I heard a chef in a TV cookery competition admit 'If I don't up my game I'm going home, to be fair'.

Each of these comments would have made perfect sense with 'to be honest' in the place of 'to be fair'. They make slightly less clear sense with 'to be fair'.

What's happening here?

First let's recap on what these two different adverbial clauses mean. 'To be honest' announces, as it says, a confession, a new level of honesty. It says, 'I'll come clean'; it suggests sincerity and honesty ('to be honest, I just haven't got round to it', 'to be honest, I just don't know'). It doesn't just have to mean laying oneself bare in a vulnerable way; it can also be used to announce the removal of euphemism and tact ('to be honest, I'm really wondering why I don't just sack you', 'to be honest, you're getting on my tits'). It adds force or authority to an utterance by drawing attention to one's personal attitudes, beliefs and opinions.

'To be fair', previous to this new shift, meant a re-establishment of balance. Either I have been unfair to you (or another), as in 'to be fair, though, he does work very hard' or 'no, you did say that, to be fair'; or you (or another) have been unfair to me, 'to be fair, you'd have to admit I've been saying this since July', 'to be fair, that was not in our agreement'. 'To be fair' in this context adds force or authority by drawing attention to impersonal facts about the world.

What is interesting then, is that people using 'to be fair' in this new context are replacing a directly personal declaration with one that has the appearance of being impersonal. 'Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' has the patina of reasonableness, objectivity as if we're talking about someone else; 'our defending isn't good enough, to be honest' sounds, in comparison, like a vulnerable admission; it is almost a confession that brings about a crisis. It charges the present encounter with meaning and momentum; I am saying something to you. Something has to change, both in the fault being admitted and the nature of the present encounter. But 'our defending isn't good enough, to be fair' allows acknowledgement of error but holds it at a distance, cools it down.

In that sense, I wonder if it is similar to the epidemic of 'myself' that I've noted before. Its an impersonalisation of a personal utterance, as if our language is reflecting an aversion to personal encounters. It's a way of avoiding the emotional intensity of the situation. 

Interviewer. How happy are you with your own performance?
Footballer. I guess that's for yourself to judge.
Interview. You must have an opinion.
Footballer. Our defending isn't good enough, to be fair.

This is not an implausible exchange (listen to BBC 5Live on any Saturday, you'll hear versions of this). I think in this context, it may be about a footballer not wanting to come out and say 'I played badly', because of (a) ego and (b) not wanting to let down team morale. But it has spread into the wider culture and I wonder if we do culturally have a problem now with face-to-face contact. I'm sure I'm not the only person who prefers to email or text than to speak on the phone. That's partly about control and convenience; rather than commit to a negotiation, you can just send off your question and now it's up to someone else to deal with. But this creates an attenuation of everything else that's involved in communication; maintenance of friendship beyond mere utility, checking in on a sense of community, the  exchange of informalities, small acts of emotional labour, the grain of the voice.

And what if the values and practices of email and text were to creep further into face-to-face contact, such that the latter becomes reduced to utilitarian exchanges, hemmed in by health warnings and risk aversion? Odd verbal formations like the new 'to be fair' are perhaps the linguistic equivalent of those warnings at the bottom of corporate emails. This from the BBC:

This e-mail (and any attachments) is confidential and may contain personal views which are not the views of the BBC unless specifically stated.
If you have received it in error, please delete it from your system.
Do not use, copy or disclose the information in any way nor act in reliance on it and notify the sender immediately.
Please note that the BBC monitors e-mails sent or received.
Further communication will signify your consent to this.

There's something about 'to be fair' that suspends the situation, holds it in tongs, sanitises and quarantines what we're talking about.

This new 'to be fair' seems to me part of the way we are turning away from personal contact, allowing a form of privatisation of the public sphere. How can we reacquaint ourselves with each other, commit ourselves once again to just being with one another, unlimited by what we need to get out of any exchange?

And in case you think I'm pointing the finger anywhere else, I'm really not. This is a note to self, to be fair.